ANDY GRIFFITH: With the new health care law, more good things are coming — free checkups, lower prescription costs, and better ways to protect us and Medicare from fraud. See what else is new — I think you’re going to like it.
Bush crashes a Segway while on vacation at Kennebunkport in June 2003Republicans are obsessed with lying about Pres. Obama’s vacation time. Mainly, they love to trot out the demonstrably false claim that Obama has taken more time off than other presidents. (See below.) But now their latest lie is that the president was planning to abandon the United States on its birthday and jet over to Paris to spend July 4th with his celebrity friends:
The Hollywood Reporter reported last week that Americans living in Europe will have an Independence Day fund-raiser for the Obama campaign. Ben Shapiro at Breitbart.com turned that into an item implying, without saying, that Obama himself would be in Europe on the Fourth of July:
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) wasted no time hitting the road for the Senate recess that began on July 2 and ends July 6. There’s books to sell, dammit! So let’s get aboard our rock star tour bus and sell, sell, sell!
Enjoy watching Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky), who already looks like a fish on the pier that someone caught by mistake and didn’t throw back in time, go blank when Chris Wallace (on FOX News!) asks what the Republican alternative is to “Obamacare.”
In an appearance on Chuck Todd’s oddly named MSNBC show “The Daily Rundown” this morning, Mitt Romney’s top campaign adviser Eric “Etch-A-Sketch” Fehrnstrom admitted that Romney agrees with Pres. Obama on a fundamental issue of legal semantics about the Affordable Care Act. Fehrnstrom said that, in spite of the Supreme Court’s ruling otherwise, the penalty to be imposed on people who refuse to buy insurance under the Heritage Foundation-invented mandate in the Affordable Care Act is not a “tax.”
At minute 4:24, Todd finally gets a definitive answer:
Republicans will find the task of writing their “replace” law even more agonizing than the Democrats found original passage. The party has no internal consensus on what a replacement would look like. Worse, any replacement of the law’s popular elements will require financing. But where is that money to come from? New taxes are unacceptable. The proceeds of “closing loopholes” are already spoken for — that’s how President Romney has promised to finance his promise to cut the top rate of tax 28 percent. And he’s also promised to increase defense spending.
– Republican pundit and former George W. Bush speechwriterDavid Frum.
– Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-KY, on Fox, of all places, refusing to answer for the third time Chris Wallace’s question, “What specifically are you going to do to provide universal coverage to the 30 million people who are uninsured?”
Graph showing rise in filibuster abuse by Republicans
Writing last week before the Supreme Court decision on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, James Fallows at the Atlantic suggested that by subverting one branch of government — the Judiciary, and in particular, the Supreme Court — Republican corporatist radicals are staging a slo-mo coup right before our eyes:
Percentage of registered voters in a Rueters/Ispsos online survey who said they support the Affordable Care Act after it was upheld by the Supreme Court on Thursday. Support had previously been at 43 percent. Opposition fell by 5 percentage points, from 57 percent to 52 percent.
Mitt's Mexican cousins. Notice anything odd about the ratio of men to women?
The courage recently shown by 150 ordinary Americans whose action could, and likely will, cause them to lose everything and everyone they held dear in their lives, is awe-inspiring.
A group of about 150 Mormons quit their church in a mass resignation ceremony in Salt Lake City on Saturday in a rare display of defiance ending decades of disagreement for some over issues ranging from polygamy to gay marriage.
Participants from Utah, Arizona, Idaho and elsewhere gathered in a public park to sign a “Declaration of Independence from Mormonism.”
…The Utah-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is known for its culture of obedience, and the mass ceremony was a seldom-seen act of collective revolt.
Author Martha Beck has written extensively about her own decision to become an “apostate,” as Mormons call the people who leave the cult. She described the threats toward her family in her book, Leaving the Saints: How I Lost the Mormons and Found My Faith. These included promises to make her husband unemployable, ostracize her children, and more darkly, alert the “Danites,” a type of Mormon assassins whose existence, like polygamy, the church denies.
If you’ve read the book — and if you want to know more about the Latter Day Saints I highly recommend it, along with Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven — you realize how extraordinary was the move by these 150 people who could no longer go along with Mormonism’s bizarre teachings.
From Trump’s “stolen election” lies, we can’t get no relief,
He carps on about stolen votes, but he never names the thief.
Somebody needs to tell this guy
Americans aren’t buying his lies,
And that he’s turned us into the United States of Disbelief.
“If you are committing fraud against the American people, all of us in public leadership should be trying to stop it and throw you in prison for enriching yourself off the American taxpayer.”
“We are done, Americans are done with endless conflict in the Middle East, spending trillions of dollars, American lives… this is insane and we have to call it for what it is.”
“The U.S. State Department announced on Monday that it has revoked more than 175,000 visas during President Donald Trump’s administration so far,” Fox News reports.
President Donald Trump is asking for $1,500,000 million for the military for next year. That’s close to $600 billion (adjusted for inflation) more than we were spending on the military in fiscal year 2025, before Trump took office, Alternet reports. This increase is huge by any measure. It comes to around $4,600 per household. It is around 8% of the total budget.
A new Emerson College survey of likely 2026 voters finds the Democrats with an 11-point advantage over the Republicans on the generic congressional ballot, leading 53% to 42%. President Trump holds a 39% job approval rating, consistent with the past two months, whereas his disapproval increased another point, to 57%.
A new American Research Group poll finds just 30% of Americans say they approve of the way Donald Trump is handling his job as president and 67% say they disapprove.
Wall Street Journal: “Around 40% of voters in the 2024 election said the economy was their top issue, far outstripping any other matter. And those voters favored Donald Trump by 60% to 38%. Many say they were moved by his pledges to tame inflation, rebuild U.S. infrastructure, cut red tape and trim government waste. … About a year and a half later, more voters disapprove of Trump’s handling of the economy than approve, 61% to 35%, an average of polls by the Cook Political Report found this month.”